Karolina Skibicka Group

Karolina Skibicka, PhD, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Physiology, investigates the behavioral and neuroendocrine processes that govern fundamental homeostatic and reward controls of food intake, and ultimately how these systems fail in obesity. She aims to identify a more effective obesity treatment targeting the neural circuits underlying overeating.

By integrating careful experimental decomposition of behavior with neuropharmacology, genetic manipulations, and molecular methods her group aims to gain insight into how food and feeding behavior affects the brain, and in turn how the brain regulates feeding and food choices.

Recent discoveries by her group include findings that satiety or hunger hormones, for example glucagon-like peptide 1 or ghrelin, which are altered by nutritional status, affect far more than feeding behavior and body weight. They profoundly affect reward derived from food but also alcohol, emotionality and decision-making. This impact on behavior is paralleled by neurochemical and molecular changes in brain circuits regulating them.

Karolina is a strong advocate for inclusion of females in preclinical research. Males and females, humans and rodents alike, may detect and respond to signals controlling eating differently. Understanding these differences may be crucial to finding new effective anti-obesity treatments and ignoring them likely already led to discarding treatments that may have been effective in women but were without much effect in men.

International Collaborations

Karolina Skibicka has extensive international collaborations, which include researchers from University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Cambridge University, University of Freiburg, and Karolinska Institute, in additional to multiple active local collaborative project.

Karolina Skibicka was appointed a Ragnar Söderberg Fellow in Medicine 2015. She has also recently been awarded the Fernström Prize in Medicine 2016 for young investigators.

Research Opportunities in the Laboratory

We welcome motivated students interested in summer internships/masters thesis projects/ other laboratory research opportunities. For more information please contact Karolina.Skibicka@gu.se